Can the full experience include loss leaders?
Mr Couhig wants people to turn up n their droves before the match and hang around for a couple of hours post-match. How successful he is in bringing this full day out philosophy to a country where on the whole it is still mostly blokes out for a couple of beers pre and/or post match remains to be seen, but we have already seen some of the changes that are being made with this aim in mind and after a couple of games now, I would say that early customer satisfaction results are definitely coming in and since customers are quick to judge it is therefore already time to ask one simple question:
Does each part of the overall matchday experience need to make a profit or is it permissible for one or more elements to merely break even or maybe make a loss in order to sell more £20 tickets?
Sub-question: is it worth considering making a loss in the short term in order to build the service up and build the culture within the fan base? In other words, spend a year getting it right without charging top dollar with a view to having an established package which can be maximised the following season?
Comments
Loss leaders? No - the current thinking is quite the opposite. When car parking gets reduced to £8, IPA to £4 and burgers to £7 all the punters will see them as unmissable bargains and flock to AP in their droves!
I really think this is the plan. Set a high value and discount off if it to designated groups. Money off for season ticket holders, multi buy discounts and probably a sale on a specific set piece day. We just need to ride the current set up to get back to normal.
Biggest problems for me are twofold. Firstly getting enough trained staff in to service the crowd and understand a more complicated back of house model. Secondly the new systems are quite simply setting up barriers for people to spend their money. Yesterday I joined a queue for food to buy a programme. Seemed silly to me
Strange situation re the programmes. In most other respects we're moving towards a paperless operation. So why did we decide to continue with paper programmes ... and then make them virtually invisible around the ground, doing away with the kiosks and only selling them in the Village (they might have been available elsewhere but not at the time I was looking for them).
Is it a ruse by Rob to make it so hard to buy them, then use the resulting low sales as an excuse to finally stop producing paper editions?
Surely even the burgers taste better than the programmes....
I know there are already various frustrations about specific things, I gathered as much from the threads on the Leicester and Accrington games. I wasn’t looking to focus on those here, but instead look at the high level strategy. The few answers are already revealing though, people do focus on the small things and if they get the hump they do vote with their feet. So, is it better to run certain things at cost or even as a loss leader in order to get bums on seats? If the answer to that is no, is it right to do so in the short term to build the attendance up and rebuild the experience of the staff before pushing prices up to where they should be?
Reducing the price, at least for some things, now in order to regain customer confidence, would be a somewhat retrograde step, reinforcing the common idea that the stuff is too expensive in the first place (which the food is, inmho!). I think it might be hard to pull it back from there. I imagine they very much wish they had got thing right from the off - I guess the aspiration of the Couhigs was to provide an overall experience that made the paying of a higher price for things conscionable. If so, Saturday should count as a disappointment.
Like others, I found the overall (non-match) experience far less uplifting than before Covid and I spent less money because of it. I have the sense that that will be the norm for me unless there's a huge and obvious change in the efficiency with which they get things operating. It was bad enough, but tolerable, queuing five or ten minutes for a beer before. One look at the beer tent queue on Saturday, around 2.25pm, and we walked straight past. The food truck looked OK - just not going to pay £8.50 for a burger or similar at a football ground. That's just me. I gather I'm not alone in that and trust that the Couhigs know they will find a sufficient market for that.
Regarding the logistics, it's a post-Covid world where the whole hospitality industry is scratching around for staff, some of whom have moved out of the sector for good. It must be a nightmare to find reliable people who are prepared to take on a 23 days a year roll, experienced and reliable - even rarer surely. I would cut the club some slack here, but as you say, they have priced themselves at the premium end from the get-go and premium price demands don't often put people in the mood for slack giving.
I don't think the price point needs to be an irreversible position, it would generate a huge amount of goodwill if the club were to show a little humility here. An announcement along the lines of 'we know we are behind on some things and here are the reasons for that -insert blurb here-, so for the next month or two whilst everything is getting ironed out, we are revising our hospitality prices'. Moreover, if the club really want to change the culture to a turn-up-for-the-day type event, they need to establish the culture first and leaking established pre-match attendees on the back of an extra quid per pint and a leaner set of choices isn't going to help. There's nothing more appealing to would-be punters than an already-busy establishment.
@Ed_ the answer to your original question has to be yes. The experiment with the free park and ride being evidence of such and the club deserve full credit for attempting something like that.
I also agree that they should be given some slack and time for trying to get the catering and beer selling right. They clearly see food and drink as being integral to the “experience” so I’m sure they will work on getting it better.
My main hope is that they are flexible enough to realise that some of the changes they have made for their convenience (cashless sales affecting programmes and 50/50 for example) are inconvenient for many people attendinf